You think about it. Food is the basis for everything. Without food, it’s all over. Kaput. They don’t lie when they say you are what you eat. If you can’t get nothing to eat, you are nothing. Nothing. They also don’t lie when they say you eat to live. And you live to eat. What’s someone’s culture but the way he eats? Everybody living from meal to meal, even if it takes somebody three days to get to the next one. Call that the culture of poverty. Maybe you a nomad or you tied to the land. It’s how you get your food. It’s how you organize to get your food. Keep your food. Keep your food for yourself. Who grows it? Cultivates it? Sells it? Cooks it? Who gets fed and does not get fed? Who throws it away? Who eats the leftovers?

What’s the story of the world? How come Magellan comes to bother folks like us in faraway islands? It’s to make their food taste better. Once you taste a secret, you go running after your tongue. It can’t be helped. Once you know this principle of the world, then everything becomes clear. You take Marx. You take Freud. You take Einstein. You take Suzuki. The politics of food. The sex of food. The relativity of food. The Zen of food.

I tell these radical kids, eventually all the answers can be found in food. Are they listening? Follow the food, I say. You born in the city. You forget your connection to the earth. And I don’t mean just Watsonville or Delano. That’s what guys like me have, the knowledge. We never stop. Everywhere we go, we touch the food right at the source. We digging the earth, sowing the seed. We pulling the weeds. Then cutting cane or slicing pineapple. Shucking lettuce or cutting asparagus. Dirt under the nails, under the blisters, in the grooves of our hands. It never washes out.

Then harvesting grapes. When grapes are ready, there’s nothing more beautiful and luxurious. I don’t say this like I’m the grower. I say this because who cannot appreciate the miracle of planted food comes back every year with your encouragement? These grapes are my grapes, my children. The small, sour, purple ones crushed for Gallo wine. Large, green, seedless Thompson for Dole fruit cocktail. The reds for Sun-Maid raisins. But that’s just the earth.